Suffering from Duplicity

by keif on April 28, 2008

In my efforts to play with wordpress and blogging at large, I’ve suffered from the dreaded duplicate content. Not posting twice, not posting two versions of the same thing – but the tweet posts (and twitter sidebar). Watching it from my side has been interesting, and I get the dreaded sense of overkill that comes with the buzzword Web two point oh. I can’t believe people put forth the effort so that everything they do is broadcast on every available channel.

Overkill much? – the downfall of Web 2.0

I aim to set a personal standard to walk away from that – I’ve got accounts on nearly every social medium, but to tie them all together? People set up their accounts so that each is what the other is. So now, they’ve got one place to update, but if they’ve got friends with the same services, doing the same thing, we get a barrage of spam – the same message five times (or more)! Is that necessary? Is it useful?

Personally, it’s a waste. It destroys the purpose of the machine if you make it your magic bullet. These services aren’t meant to be tied together so when I tweet, I also blog, pownce, IM, email and digg. I use the ones my friends are on, the ones that are recommended, and I try out the new ones to see if they may replace an older one (i.e. my recent PC conversion from Pidgin to Digsby).

The REAL benefit to social apps

I use twitter as my thought application process. I throw out ideas just because it’s like saying them in a crowded room. Thanks to twitter, I learned about Zappos corporate twitter machine – a very

innovative, fresh use for twitter. How do I want to use them? I use twitter to post about when I update any of my blogs. I use twitter to pass links I used to email to a couple people or send a quick IM. I use it to network with new people. I use it to tweet. That’s it.

I have the same social sites you do, with my own accounts (and I’ll eventually get them all listed on the sidebar!). I use them for what they’re worth – and not trying to hack them into one giant useless application that does nothing well except spam the net that “ikeif twitters – what the hell?”

Interesting you’d post about this, it was on my mind yesterday. I actually tumbled on it twice: http://afhill.tumblr.com — the Zeldman article is about the demise of the “personal site”, and the granular social networks slideshow is about how your tech friends may not be interested in running. It’s something I struggle with myself, and why I maintain two separate blogs (afhill.com and runlikeagrrl on lj). I actually also had an email exchange with Mel McBridge about it as well. Do you post about all aspects of your life as they all contribute to who you are, or do you consider your audience and give them only what you think they really want?

http://www.afhill.com/blog/ Andrea Hill

P.S. what’s the difference between “Subscribe to comments via email” and “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail”? Is one only for responses to my comment?

http://ikeif.net keif

Are you seeing both? I tried double checking after installing plug-ins and I only see “Subscribe to comments via email”